“What does SEO cost?” is a fair question that gets a useless answer, because the honest range is wide enough to be meaningless. I’ve seen monthly retainers quoted against the same brief that differ by a factor of ten, with both agencies describing real work.

So I’m not going to publish bands. Any number I put on this page would be wrong for most of the businesses reading it, and an invented range is worse than no range. What I can give you is what actually sits inside the price, and the questions that separate a real programme from a thin package before you sign anything.

Plenty of people are shopping for exactly this: “seo packages” alone gets around 1,200 Australian searches a month (Ahrefs, August 2026). That’s a lot of businesses hunting for a price list that doesn’t exist.

Why two quotes for the same job look nothing alike

Three reasons, and only one of them is dodgy.

The first is scope. “SEO” can mean a technical audit and nothing else, or it can mean the audit plus developer time, a content programme, digital PR and monthly analysis. Those are different products wearing the same word.

The second is who does the work. An hour of a senior specialist and an hour of a junior working through a checklist both appear on an invoice as an hour. They don’t produce the same result, and that gap explains most of the price difference between agencies.

The third is the dodgy one. Some packages are priced to be bought rather than to work: a number low enough that nobody escalates the decision, wrapped around deliverables that can be produced at volume. More on how that works further down.

What you are actually buying

Time from specific people. That’s it. When you pay a retainer you’re buying a number of hours a month at a certain level of seniority, and the whole question is how many hours and whose.

Which makes the first question easy, and you should put it to us as readily as to anyone else. How many hours does this fee represent, and who does them? A vague answer usually means the hours are junior, or that the fee was never tied to hours at all.

The three shapes the work comes in

A one-off audit and roadmap is a fixed piece of work with a document at the end. It suits a business that has a developer and someone internally who can act on findings. Its failure mode is famous: the report gets read, admired and filed.

An ongoing retainer is the usual arrangement. A monthly fee, an agreed body of work, and enough continuity for the compounding to happen. It suits a business with no search capability of its own. Its failure mode is drift, where months three to twelve look suspiciously like month two.

Embedded specialists sit inside a team you already have. That’s what we do with AGL, where our people work within their internal digital optimisation team rather than lobbing recommendations over a fence. It suits organisations that own enterprise tools and lack the headcount to use them, costs more per hour than the alternatives, and only makes sense when there’s a real team to embed into.

The questions that expose a thin package

Take these into any pitch. The answers matter more than the number on the last page.

What do I get in month one, and what do I get in month seven? A thin package answers both the same way. Real programmes front-load the technical and structural work, then change shape as that gets done.

Who implements the fixes? This is the one that quietly kills half the retainers I’ve reviewed. If the agency only recommends, and your developer queue runs six months deep, you’re paying monthly for a document. Ask whether they ship changes themselves and what the plan is when your developers can’t.

Who writes the content, and where do they sit? I’m not precious about offshore work, but a page about Australian energy retailing written by somebody who has never paid an Australian power bill reads exactly like what it is.

How do you build links, and can I see the last ten you built for another client? A vague answer here means bought links, and bought links are a risk you carry rather than one the agency carries.

What do you measure, and where does the data live? If the reporting only exists inside a PDF the agency produces, you can’t verify it and you can’t take it with you. Positions, clicks and conversions belong in your own Search Console, your own GA4 and a dashboard you can open on a Tuesday without asking permission.

What have you decided not to do, and why? Anyone who has genuinely looked at your site has opinions about what isn’t worth doing. A proposal with no exclusions is a proposal nobody prepared.

What happens to the work if we stop? Content you paid for, changes made to your site, and every account and tool should stay yours. Ask it plainly and get it in writing.

Can I speak to a client who has been with you two years? Twelve months of SEO is a start. Two years tells you whether it compounded or plateaued.

Where cheap packages make their margin

Not through efficiency. Through deliverables that can be produced at volume regardless of your business: a fixed quota of generic articles, an automated audit any tool will run free, directory submissions, and a monthly report generated by software with a logo dropped on it.

The tell is that every client gets the same list. Search problems are specific. A site with an indexation problem and a site with an authority problem need almost nothing in common, and a package that answers both with the same twelve tasks is answering neither.

Judging the price against the return

You can do this on the back of an envelope without a single number from me.

Take the gross margin on one customer. Work out how many extra customers a year the fee has to produce just to break even. Then ask whether the search volume in your category could plausibly deliver that many. High-margin, low-volume businesses might need two or three, which is a low bar. Low-margin, high-volume ones might need hundreds, which is worth saying out loud before you sign.

Then be honest about time. Nothing in search pays back in month one, and an agency promising it is describing paid ads. Pace is the fastest ramp we’ve run and it still took a month before the first new content went live and four months before the numbers got interesting: 116 Google impressions in February 2026, 113,949 cumulative by August, on a new domain with no link spend. That is unusually quick, and the Pace case study explains why it worked there.

At the other end sits AGL: a large site with real authority getting specialist attention, and a 58% lift in average search position within six months, 14.5k features in Google’s AI Overviews, 40% more keywords in the top three. Different problem, different work, different invoice, all in the AGL case study.

When not to buy SEO at all

If nobody searches for what you sell, don’t. Check Keyword Planner first: a category with no search demand can’t be optimised into having some.

If you need revenue this quarter, don’t start here either. Search is a compounding asset with a slow front end, and a business that needs cash in eight weeks should be buying clicks rather than rankings.

And if your website can’t be changed without a six-month project, fix that before you buy anything. The best search programme in the country can’t help a site nobody is allowed to edit.

What a fair quote looks like

It comes after somebody has looked at your site rather than before. It says what gets done, by whom and in what order, names what it excludes, and can be measured against numbers held in your accounts rather than the agency’s.

We audit before we quote, and you keep the audit whether or not you hire us, because a quote written without one is a guess with a logo on it. That’s how our SEO work starts. The fastest way to get a number for your business is to tell us what you’re trying to fix.

What SEO costs in Australia, and what you get for it